Abouet, author of the award-winning Aya graphic novels set in Côte d’Ivoire, will discuss contemporary comic art with Colin Cotterill, bestselling crime writer and inveterate comics blogger based in South East Asia, Jeremy Nell, the maverick enfant terrible of South African cartooning, and Leonora van Staden, an Afrikaans cartooning auteur with a feminist axe to grind.

Serious vs Hilarious, two serious women and two very funny men discussing comic art will be facilitated by Andy Mason on Friday 13 May at the Congregational Churh.

Marguerite Abouet was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1971, and sent to study in France at the age of 12, under the care of a great uncle. Aya, her graphic novel series, taps into Abouet’s childhood memories of Ivory Coast in the 1970s, a prosperous, promising time in that country’s history. This is an Ivory Coast which stands in stark opposition to Western images of Africa as a continent plagued by AIDS and civil wars.